Reign of Gaming

Since her abilities are a little underwhelming when not Mantra'd, and there are too many requirements for her to pull off two Mantras in one team fight, I think it would be a welcome change to move her current passive to a passive on her ult, and make her passive a reset on Mantra on kills and assists.

Pretty much a combination of interesting things I found in the comments. Could make her too snowbally, but hey, Riot seems to like retardedly snowbally champs nowadays.

Let's try to summarize a little what she has.

First, her AA animation is clearly good in my mind, it is like Syndra, very reactive. It will be very good for LA and harassing your opponent (a thing you will do because of your passive).Her range is clearly better now, making her less suceptible to harass, gank and other trap.

Her passive increase with her level (Certainly a at level 6, 11 and 16) making harass really proficient with her. Apparently, it scale with the number of people who were touched. So if you hit 3 ennemy with a Q when you are level 16, you gain 6 second CDR. Same for her shield, so in a very good possibility, you can already gain 8 second CDR from the shield AOE and maybe 4 second CDR from the Q without mantra. It isn't bad at all.

Right now, her mantra has only one charge. It isn't a lot and maybe Riot will need to make a second charge, lower Mantra CD or increase the CDR you gain from AA/Spell. PBE will be here to show that.

Her Q seem fantastic. Without mantra, it is a poke spell with AOE effect (like Khazyx W not evolued for example) who has a good ratio with good basic damage and a little slow. (Apparently, the slow is now fiwed to 25% at all rank on the last PBE patch, certainly for the effectiveness of her Q under mantra).
On mantra, I can be wrong but it seem so dangerous. I mean, she gain a +0,3 AP ratio and some nice damage for after that a big AOE explosion... If I am not wrong, it is like at level 5:
260 + 175 + 350  + (0,6 + 0,3 + 0,6 AP) = 785 (1,5 AP)...
IT IS FREAKING HUGE. And also, the cooldown of this spell is low and don't really seem too mana intensive (50 mana level 1, 90 level 5 when Karma has less mana on her start but more on her level up.). Also, it can be really good for a stacking tears.

Then her W... It is a root (which is always good) who seem quite classical. Normal range, damage quite normal... But it is under mantra that it become 'powerful'. It does 520 magical damage at level 5 with a ratio of 1,2... And it heal! Just think of it. You shield yourself, mantra, W the opponent and free healing!

Just think of the defensive possibility. You go on me? I shield myself, run faster and can root you while healing. It is just gonna be quite tricky but I am sure Karma can be a good character to prevent gank in general. Shield + MS + Heal + Root + Slow = Good.

Her E now... Don't think about the damage, think about the freaking utility.
It is a shield with MS... Under mantra, it do AOE damage with an AOE shield who also give an AOE MS boost! It is like a freaking shurelya and iron locket put together!

I think the biggest flaw of karma will the CD of her ult. I think 2 charge will be VERY VERY too strong on her when you see her spell but... I think lowering her ult CD or increasing her passive is a good way to be sure of her viability.

As a mid, she is gonna be very annoying. Why?
She has AOE spell who can destroy minion wave easily, making her a good pusher and a good roamer.
She has some good roaming tool (MS, shield for an ally, a root, a slow and with her mantra, it can be really strong) who also make her good for an invade at level 1 I think (Hey hey, AOE damage + AOE shield + MS :3)She has some very good tool to create or prevent a gank. (Shield herself, mantra W her opponent so she can take not many damage OR shield her jungler who gain MS/Shield, W the opponent and slow him with Q so he is certainly rooted).
With her mantra, she gain good burst but yes, in general, she isn't gonna a burster like Brand or Veigar. The problem will be that she can't do that much on a TF because of her ult CD. She will need some VERY good intuition from the player about which spell to use. (Q or E? In general, you will use W mantra in duel situation because this spell is incredible for that).

As a support... She is really interesting. She has a root (which is strong despite the duration you need to make it), she has a slow who can harass her opponent and... She has a very very useful shield. Why? Because not only can it take some damage, it give MS. It is incredibly good for kiting or escaping.
You can play a very aggressive comp or a more passive comp. I think she can be really interesting with Ashe or Kogmaw.

Short idea: The passive gives at level 16 two seconds cd per spell hit, and one for aa. With maxed cdr, your mantra has 27 seconds remaining.

Since you are going to take Q2 or E2 in team fights, you can have up to ten champion hits. So you would end up, in a best case scenario, with a 7 second mantra cooldown. Further reduced by your W and auto attacks.

More realistic version: You hit maybe 2 people with Q1 and 3-4 with E2 when you aim it on a engaging bruiser like Xin. That would make for 10 to 12 second reduction, leaving you with 15. Now the interesting part is that your Q has, with maxed reduction and at level 5, a 3 second cooldown. If you keep auto attacking, you should be able to do at least 2 mantras in a good running team fight.

Very situation based, but imagine two or three Q2 shot at an enemy team. Each dealing 785 +1.5 damage... I was able to do this once in my test game on pbe, so it should be possible with a good organized team and map awareness.

The biggest problem I have with the new Karma is the same I always had with her old Q - just with her E2 now. It's insanely hard to hit teammates and enemies at the same time...

What the... Karma dances Tai Chi style :)

I actually think karma looks incredibly strong right now.. Has nobody else considered that she has got an aoe speed buff and shield at level 1? that lends itself to incredible level 1 engages - she can go for aoe damage and a 50% aoe slow if the speed buff isn't necessary, that's amazingly powerful for level 1.

In terms of damage, shes no syndra but her ratios are strong, shes got shortish cooldowns and would benefit for cdr even more and so i can see builds like athenes, morellos, rylais, deathcap being extremely powerful(40% cdr, 436ap)  (on mid karma obviously). Alternatively twin shadows would work well with her w allowing her the root, for a more support karma. She has some scary versatility.    

I'm thinking Nashor's over Morello's because of her passive

Experimented a bit with Karma on-hit and Karma AP/Attkspeed. Not worth it, trust me.

Her ratios are 0.6(per 7-5 sec) 0.6(per 16-14 sec) 0.5(per 12 sec). How is that strong?

I advice you to read my post who above this one but under mantra, the AP ratio of her Q and W become really different and huge.

I think Frozen Heart will still be a good item on her, like it is now. That can be the other CDR item with your Athene's. Morello's with Athene's just gives you a lot more mana regen than you really need and Morello's passive is pretty bad. Frozen Heart gives your armor, which is really nice so you don't die so quickly since mostly AD champs are played nowadays. It gives you enough CDR to have the cap. The passive is always nice to have in team fights. And it gives you the MANA to work with the mana regen from Athene's, instead of just godly mana regen. 

The only other options for max CDR I can see is to take Spirit Visage if their team is primarily magic damage dealers (helps with her mantra heal too.), Blackfire torch definitely on the maps it's available on, and you could also build Deathfire Grasp and take the CDR masteries and 1 scaling CDR glyph ( or just be fucking content with 39% CDR lol). She's not an assassin though..

Karma got a massive nerf to her mantra and shield.

The new E is weaker than her old E, unless mantraed.

Where she could use 3 mantras in a single fight before, she can now use 1.
Nerfs to E and W recharge.

Abilities are too weak at lower ranks. Too many things scale with ranks. Usually a champion has some things that can be left at rank 1 until late game, but not karma. You need to max everything at the same time (except you can't). Slow scales, so does immobilize duration, so does speed boost strength. Why?

1.5 sec slow? 1.25 sec speed boost? Delayed immobilize that only lasts 1-2 sec? Could they make her support elements any more useless?

With old kit she at least had 5 second slow/speed boost which allowed for some really nice kiting where you stayed just out of melee range and pelted the enemy with Q. 

Also her passive (which doesn't exist anyway) got nerfed. Yesterday on Reddit AMA it was 2 sec reduced recharge per champ hit by abilities, now it's 1 sec. With 45 sec recharge on mantra, 1 sec reduction is nothing. That's quite probably the worst passive in the game, when you take into the account that it's supposed to make her R work. She actually has no passive. If they moved her passive text on her R skill, and then change her passive to "this champion has no passive" she would be literally the same and her R description would make just as much sense.

Her early values are actually better, if anything. Before, with a mantra-boosted shield, she'd be doing 150+1.4AP burst max, now she does 120+1.2AP without mantra, 145+1.5AP with mantra in the absolute worst case (Q while missing the explosion). Of course, you can cast old mantra more often than new mantra (15 sec lower CD, make it 10 or so if you're attacking too), but then again, new Karma also has a 950 range poke with better damage than old Q after level 2. Her shield is actually straight-up better at low levels; you're not going to be missing the .3 AP at that point, the base values are the same, and it gets a speed boost.

Her utility does seems to be a bit all over the place. Individually, those abilities are pretty weak, but that's a pretty wide variety of things, and a slow+immobilize seems particularly useful (if not as strong as hard cc). She does seem to be more suited to a mid role than a support role, if only because her ratios are pretty good (dat 1.5 ratio on her mantra'd Q). She seems like she would be an amazing teamfighter, given her AOE (that e is a free Locket per 200AP + a free short duration Shurellias + an AOE nuke + a single target shield).

The passive didn't get nerfed, it scales with level (1/1.5/2, not sure when that scales up), that information was in the AMA as well. With 40% CDR, her mantra's on a 27s CD; you have an opportunity to reduce that to just 5 seconds on a perfect ability combo (10 hits from mantra Q or Q + mantra E, + 1 hit from W). If you don't assume utter perfection, it still seems like she's looking at a likely two mantras per lategame teamfight.

Her passive does suffer from Renekton/Shyvana syndrome, in that it modifies how her completely unique ability works and therefore might as well be part of that ability; that doesn't necessarily make it weak, per se, but is a bit silly.

It makes the passive non-existent. Imagine we changed akali passive to: Akali gains an Essence of Shadow for each kill or assist she obtains. And just delete that text from her R. How does that sound to you? Shit, right? Speaking of resets, her passive would be way better if it reset mantra recharge on kills and assists. In team fights this would make her snowball pretty hard.

When talking about mantra, you all keep assuming that you'll be hitting 5 people twice with mantra'd Q and that you'll have 40% CDR and that you'll be high level. That's great but what about if I play support? What about if I play mid and have Athene's, Rabadon's and sorc boots and I don't have 40% CDR? What about if I'm level 10 or less? What about if enemies don't group up into a clump of 5 people like morons? What if I wanna mantra something else than my Q?

It's shit. You need to be max levels and rich and enemies have to play perfectly into your hand and you might end up with able to cast another mantraed ability shortly after your mantraed Q.

Also stop combing Mantra effect with base ability effect and saying "GUISE THIS IS POWERFUL". You'd get base ability effect anyway. 

As far as I can see she's a pretend support/mid mix like Lux, that's gonna get played primarily as mid because she needs that AP to stay relevant (unlike a proper support like Thresh, Lulu, Leona, Zyra, Alistar, pretty much any real support). So she's kinda like lux, except she has no passive and her ulti is shitter and lux has a better shield (stronger and can shield multiple allies).

Karma's ulti is basically a choice between:
- Single target 75/150/225/300 (+0.6*AP) magic damage and heal over time
- AoE 25/75/125/175(+0.3*AP) with a short slow and  a much delayed (i.e. really easily dodgeable) 50/150/250/350(+0.6*AP) AoE.
- AoE damage 60/140/220/300(+0.6*AP) and half that as a shield, and really short 20/30/40/50/60% AoE speed boost

Any choice is weaker than most mage ultis, most notably they do far less damage than Lux Final Spark that has comparable cooldown on top of a massive range and it's not as dodgeable as Q mantra effect damage. 

But nope, everyone thinks her Q is 1.5AP when mantraed, instead of thinking her Q is 0.6 AP and her ulti is 0.9 AP. 
When you look at her mantra effects as a separate ulti spell (which is what they effectively are thanks to 45 sec recharge) you see how bad her numbers actually are. Her E is now one of the worst shields on a supporting champ in the game. 250 + 0.5 AP? lulz.

Arguably, Karma's real unique pseudo-passive is that she gets to use her ult at half strength at level 1, which Akali wouldn't be able to do in that example. But really, the issue is that it's not really useful to compare abilities piecewise like that, particularly when it comes to passives. Karma's passive would be stronger if it were moved to her ult and she got a stat boost or something. The same could be said of, say, Katarina's passive (move the effect to her E or something, replace with stats); that doesn't make Kat's passive weak. 

I'm well aware that landing everything ever is quite unrealistic, I was just lining out potential. If you say that you're going to land all of your abilities on two people (probably undershooting for a good AOE mage combo, but eh), that's still 10s worth of CDR, which brings her down to 17s with 40% CDR. Considering that her Q has a 3s CD on 40% CDR, that could be reduced to 11s fairly easily (3 single target hits, more CDR if she hits multiple targets); add in an auto attack per Q and that goes down to 9s. That's a very realistic two mantras per teamfight.

As for a straight comparison, Lux's ult at lvl 3 deals 500 (670 with her passive) +.75AP AOE damage with a 40s CD. Karma's lvl 3 mantra'd Q does 525 + .9AP AOE + moderate-strong slow with a 45s reducible cooldown (of course, that's in exchange for being easier to dodge and having shorter range). That's terribly comparable, though saying that you deal as much damage as Lux is not much of an accomplishment. That being said, I do think that Mantra could do with a level-scaled CD, if only because it makes leveling it up a bit more interesting.

Her shield is very similar to Lulu's shield in strength; it loses .1AP ratio but is slightly better at early levels. Honestly, it's rather hard to compare shields to each other, considering that Lulu, Janna, and Karma are the only ones with targeted general shields (and in that, Janna > Lulu ~= Karma). Morg shield is better against magic but is useless against physical. Lux shield is only better if you AOE or refresh the shield (doing the latter depends pretty heavily on incoming damage and is a moderately difficult SS). That's not considering shield utility, of course, but I don't think you could objectively say that Karma has the worst shield.

I think you're right in saying that she'll be a better mid than a support. She seems like she would benefit a whole bunch from CDR (kinda like how Ryze does), but supports can't itemize easily for 40% CDR and don't get blue buff. Her ratios are decent (W -> mantra Q does 2.2AP, another Q 3-5s later adds .6, plus you still have .5 on her shield), and her itemless power is only okay, so she'll benefit a bunch from AP. But I dunno for sure, she's still in the balancing phase, and it'll probably take a while before people properly figure her out.

how about zac? no changes? :/